Carrion Comfort - By Dan Simmons Page 0,1

was just a dream fragment— a little disconnected dream-vignette—that got me hooked. No plot, not even a nonsensical dream plot, just an image.

I dreamt I was watching as an elderly woman ran through a dark forest. The trees were close together and the old woman was not moving quickly— she was too old to move very quickly— but she was obviously fleeing something. And that something was making a terrifying roar of a noise. It seemed to be twilight in the dream, after sunset or just before dawn, and the forest was thick and dark and filled with that growing unearthly roar as the old woman fled. And then I saw that the roar was coming from a large, black helicopter moving sideways above the trees. The helicopter was obviously hunting for the fleeing old woman and as I watched her I had the sudden impression that she was not a victim, not a persecuted innocent soul, but something both more or less than human and that those unseen killers in the helicopter should find her and should kill her. I had no idea what made this kindly faced elderly woman a monster, but I was certain— in the dream— that she was and that she must be destroyed.

And then I awoke.

This dream happened sometime in the summer of 1982, when I was writing my first novel, Song of Kali. It had nothing to do with the novel so I filed the image away and forgot it for the time being. In those years I was a full-time school teacher so I had to write any novels I might have in mind during my less-than-three-month summer vacations. It’s good training for a future full-time novelist who will spend the rest of his life under constant deadlines.

I’d begun writing professionally the year before, in 1981, just after I’d given up my dream of writing for publication. When my wife told me that year that she was pregnant, I’d given up my brief (three-year) struggle to get published. As a swan song, I went off to a summer writers’ workshop just to hear some writers that I’d always enjoyed, George R. R. Martin being one of them. But one had to submit a piece of fiction even to attend this writers’ workshop so I paid my dues that way. And then I met Harlan Ellison who critiqued that short story I’d had to submit amid a day of Ellisonian critiquing that none of us there will ever forget.

That encounter with Harlan has, in its own modest circles, become something of a legend (you can find it in both Harlan’s and my introductions to my first collection of short fiction, Prayers to Broken Stones) and I admit it can be inspiring to young writers who think it will take a miracle to get them published. Harlan, in his unique monster/mentor way, was that miracle for me.

After he told me at that workshop that I had no choice, that I was that rarest of things—a writer— and would always be so whether I disciplined myself to write for publication or not, I went back to work writing even while I continued to teach. That fall of 1981 I sold a story to OMNI. Also that year, before the story was published in OMNI, I was informed that the story I’d dragged to the workshop where I met Harlan, “The River Styx Runs Upstream,” had tied for first place in Twilight Zone Magazine’s first short-story contest for previously unpublished writers. Harlan, it turns out, was one of the four judges— the others being Carol Serling (wife of the late Rod Serling), Robert (Psycho) Bloch, and Richard Matheson— and if Harlan hadn’t disqualified himself when he saw my name and story, I would have won the thing outright rather than tied. The Twilight Zone Magazine editor at the time said that they’d received more than fifteen thousand story entries in that contest.

It seems that people were hungry to be published. And they still are. So in the spring of 1982 my contest story “The River Styx Runs Upstream” appeared in Twilight Zone Magazine and weeks later another story, “Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams,” (which later became the source for my novel The Hollow Man) appeared in OMNI.

That summer of 1982 I wrote my first novel, Song of Kali, which was to become the first first-novel ever to win the World Fantasy Award. That autumn, retrieving the memory of the frightening old lady fleeing the